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Table of Contents
Debugging Code
The following page gives some examples of how to debug C code.
GDB
The Gnu DeBugger is a very powerful tool, but not easy to use. Beginners may
first try insight, a very nice GDB-Gui.
KGDB over Serial Console
Debugging Kernel Modules
To make debugging of kernel modules useful at all, one needs to fill GDB with
information about the symbols each loaded module contains. Since kernel
modules are no regular executables, GDB doesn't find the relevant sections
itself. But beware: we need to get rid of the relocation done to a module when
it's being loaded. The easiest way to extract the section locations is via
sysfs when the module has already been loaded:
$ cd /sys/module/gdb1/sections $ ls -A1 .bss (where the BSS section was loaded) .data (where the data section was loaded) .exit.text .gnu.linkonce.this_module .init.text __ksymtab __ksymtab_strings .note.gnu.build-id .rodata.str1.1 .strtab .symtab .text (where the text section was loaded) $ cat .text .data .bss (the section addresses I care about) 0xffffffffa00f4000 (address of module's text section ...) 0xffffffffa00f4568 (... and data ...) 0xffffffffa00f47c0 (... and BSS)
then we can load the shared-object into gdb specifying the correct addresses:
(gdb) add-symbol-file .../gdb1.ko 0xffffffffa00f4000 \ -s .data 0xffffffffa00f4568 \ -s .bss 0xffffffffa00f47c0 add symbol table from file ".../gdb1.ko" at .text_addr = 0xffffffffa00f4000 .data_addr = 0xffffffffa00f4568 .bss_addr = 0xffffffffa00f47c0 (y or n) y Reading symbols from .../gdb1.ko...done.
Printing Non-Global Variables
While global variables can easily be addressed by their (unique) name, things get more complicated with file- or function-local variables due to their limited scope. gdb though allows to qualify the variable name by prepending the file or function name:
(gdb) p 'test.c'::static_var $2 = 42 (gdb) p main::local_var $1 = 1337
Simple Kernel Debugging
gdb vmlinux /proc/kcore
This does not allow for run-time analysis (breakpoints et al.), but printing variables and the like.
In order to see changed variable values, one has to reload the core file first:
(gdb) core-file /proc/kcore